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When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.
What I love about this exchange is that it takes place across the supposed “two cultures” of science and the humanities, jumping in a remarkably freewheeling way between literature, philosophy, and the fields of AI and machine learning, which were at the time barely even born. Their conversation, part of which I’ve reproduced below, models something we badly need today: not just the simple joy of exploring ideas for their own sake, but also the ability to avoid seeing your work and life as something defined by what it excludes. Big Red gum.’ But Jahai speakers named smells with relative ease.” (From this great New Yorker article by UC Davis anthropologist Manvir Singh on how language shapes thought)
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